Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Someone once asked baseball great Yogi Berra why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant. He replied: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

The same reasoning is on display in the California public school system, where the state Department of Education, the California Teachers Association, and the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning continue to promote the notion of a “continuing” or “impending” teacher shortage.

CFTL is the Chicken Little of teacher shortages, and has been for many years. With thousands of teachers being laid off in the state, it’s getting harder and harder for the organization’s analysts to make that case. But they haven’t stopped trying, despite their own data showing a marked improvement in teacher qualifications and the undeniable evidence of few new teachers being able to find jobs, except in math and science.

Just like Yogi, CFTL president and executive director Margaret Gaston is afraid no one will enter teaching because it’s too crowded. “What we’re concerned about is when California begins to lift out of this economic crisis, is California going to have an adequate pool of teachers from which schools and districts can choose?” she said.

Gaston and the other California teacher shortage alarmists refuse to accept responsibility for their rhetoric. Because of seniority provisions in collective bargaining agreements, the teachers being laid off are the same ones who answered the clarion call for new teachers to fill the previous “shortage.” In the unlikely event that California ever finds itself without teachers to fill its classrooms, CDE, CTA and CFTL will have no one but themselves to blame.

Click here to read:

1) California Teachers Association’s (Almost) Million Dollar Race to the Stop
2) Contract Hits
3) Last Week’s Intercepts
4) Quote of the Week

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Vista school trustees are seeking reimbursement from the teachers union for about $128,000 in salary payments made to the union’s president over the past three years.

Under a 1995 agreement, the Vista Unified School District has been paying for the union president’s salary, even though that person is on leave from the classroom. In exchange, the union has paid the salary of a replacement teacher, who invariably is on a lower pay scale. As a result, the school district has paid more money to the union than the union has returned to the district.

As ridiculous as it might be to pay a teacher’s salary (and benefits, unaddressed here) to someone who is running a union full-time, it is a standard provision in most collective bargaining agreements. If this draws more attention to the issue of release time, all well and good. But there is zero chance the district will get the union to return that money.

Sid Hatch of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association wins this week’s Soylent Green Eater Award for Spouting Union Talking Points in the Wake of Indefensible Teacher Behavior.

Seven-year-old Lamya Cammon was absentmindedly playing with her braids, which have plastic beads on their ends. The noise annoyed her first-grade teacher. The teacher called Lamya to the front of the room, cut off one of her braids, and sent her back to her seat, crying. The teacher ultimately apologized to Lamya’s mother and was fined $175 by police for disorderly conduct. She remains in the classroom but Lamya was assigned to a different teacher.

That would be the end of this unremarkable story if not for the efforts of Mr. Hatch, who told WISN-TV on camera:

“As budget constraints get tighter every year, the stress level and frustrations do increase.”

How about the stress level and frustrations of parents and taxpayers? Between 1990 and 2008, inflation-adjusted Milwaukee Public Schools per-pupil spending “increased by 36% and state aid grew by 58%. Over the same period, enrollment fell by a percentage point and is projected to continue falling, leaving the system with enough excess capacity for some 22,000 students.”

So let that be a lesson to you, parents of Milwaukee. Spend more on public schools or some stressed-out teacher will hack off your seven-year-old’s hair. This message has been approved by the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association.

Dateline Madison, Wisconsin:

Wisconsin schools will be required to teach the history of organized labor under a bill signed by Gov. Jim Doyle.

The bill Doyle signed Thursday also requires Wisconsin schools to teach the history of collective bargaining.

The proposal has been around for years but never passed. This year it cleared the Democratic controlled Legislature despite opposition from school boards and administrators who said they didn’t want the curriculum micromanaged.

Labor unions supported the bill.

Doyle said in a statement that he was happy to sign the bill so students would understand the importance of the labor movement in creating basic workplace rights.

As a public service to the students of Wisconsin, Intercepts provides a bibliography of labor history unlikely to make the cut in the approved curriculum:

The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa And Corrupt Labor Unions by Robert F. Kennedy

Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor by David Witwer

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement by James Jacobs

Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise by Robert Fitch

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan

On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg

Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics by Linda Chavez

Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch With America by Max Green

Perspectives on Union Corruption: Lessons from the Databases by A.J. Thieblot

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Should Labor Power Be Reduced?” with Victor Riesel, plus the Victor Riesel papers at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library in New York City

The Oakland Education Association is demanding a 15 percent raise over three years in its teacher contract negotiations. That’s ridiculous enough for a district that has lost a higher percentage of students in the last five years than any of California’s largest 125 districts. What’s especially galling is that Oakland placed a parcel tax referendum on the November 2008 ballot to raise $10 million for teachers’ salaries – and the union opposed it because it would have earmarked $2.5 million for charter schools. The measure failed.

The OEA then passed a resolution last October stating the union “would not participate in any parcel tax coalition that advocated giving money to charter schools.” Two of those Oakland charter schools were founded by then-mayor Jerry Brown, the once (and future?) governor of California who signed the state’s public employee collective bargaining law in 1976.

OEA is threatening to strike if it doesn’t get what it wants, and its position is bolstered by the efforts of the California Teachers Association, which managed to undermine a bill in the state Assembly that would have “allowed children in the lowest-performing schools to transfer to any school in the state or let their parents force overhauls that could include firing teachers or changing the school into a charter school. ”

With thousands of parents already voting with their feet, a teachers’ strike that closes down the Oakland schools would only accelerate the process. Be careful what you wish for, OEA.

That’s the question Scott McLeod is asking on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. Scott was invited to address the NEA board of directors on the topic of disruptive innovation. Scott wants commenters to stick to the topic, so keep your more colorful suggestions to yourself.

Meanwhile, NEA has launched a new publication and website – NEA Today Action – presumably because all of its other member communication efforts don’t focus enough on political activism. I particularly enjoyed the “Tips for the Association Activist,” which included “Welcome criticism, and laugh at yourself.”

Now THAT’S funny.